The case of a computer programmer accused of stealing the secret codes
used in Goldman Sachs’ rapid-fire stock trading platform shows that
even a titan of Wall Street can be caught napping at the switch. [smell setup?]

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission will consider new measures to
curb speculation in the markets for energy and other commodities, the
agency is set to announce today.

The move aims to reduce the volatility of prices but faces
resistance from top Wall Street firms, which fear the efforts could cut
into profits. Regulators and lawmakers increasingly worry that these
firms have used their size and power to inflate the prices of
commodities, booking profits in the process.

This list comes nowhere close to portraying how severely the Greatest Depression has hit the restaurant industry. There are scores of businesses that closed between Dec. 2007 and Dec. 2008 that remain empty.

And now the poor man is groveling. Begging. Imploring the banks to take his state’s IOUs. He says they are “rock solid.” California is the world’s 6th largest economy. But it was a world-beater when it came to debt-based bubble illusions.

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression (Publisher: I suggest this article to you - Rolling Stone has video with Matt Taibbi about writing of article)

Because so
many swaps are informal, the size of the small business barter economy
is hard to gauge. But Bob Meyer, publisher of Barter
News in Mission Viejo, Calif., was willing to take a crack
at it. Meyer estimates that 1 million small businesses are involved
in barter, either informally or through exchanges, with a volume
of transactions approaching $20 billion annually. This figure combines
the $10 billion that IRTA attributes to exchange trades with Meyer's
conservative estimate that informal barter accounts for another
$10 billion.

Typically,
bartering activity spikes during economic downturns. Meyer expects
the total volume of U.S. barter transactions to grow 10% this year
(historically the annual growth rate has hovered around 5%). "Right
now many small businesses

I am quickly running out of possible scenarios to prevent a severe deflationary depression from taking place. By "severe" I mean 20%+ U3 unemployment, GDP contraction of at least 25%, and a possible loss of federal funding capacity...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Seven banks were shut down by authorities
Thursday, pushing the tally of failed banks for 2009 to 52, more than
doubling the failures in 2008.

Six regional banks in Illinois and one in Texas closed their doors, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

The rash of Illinois failures are interlinked: All six banks were
controlled by one family and followed a similar business model that
“created concentrated exposure in each institution,” according to the
FDIC.

The agency said that the six failures stemmed from the banks’
investments in collateralized debt obligations and other loan losses.

I have been hearing more and more from senior Obama economic team members about the jobs they hoped for coming at the very tail end of an economic recovery. Others are talking about a GDP recovery — but not a jobs recovery.

When you do that, you have a race to the bottom as rising prices mask the steady decrease in quality. For example, how easy would it have been to progressively pull the land value component out of the equation as demand and process began to rise? It would be simply a matter of accepting only land values set in say 2000 for lending purposes. The drag would have halted speculative leveraging in its tracks. Today deleveraging is reducing those same land values to something approaching zero in a new market in which value is assigned to the replacement of the building and available rents.
This example alone shows us that a market can be readily managed and secondly, it must be managed to optimize results.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. mortgage applications plunged to a
seven-month low last week as demand for home refinancing loans tumbled
30 percent, data from an industry group showed on Wednesday.

The
drop does not bode well for the hard-hit U.S. housing market, which has
been showing some signs of stabilization, with sales rising and home
price declines moderating in many regions of the country.

The
Mortgage Bankers Association said its seasonally adjusted index of
mortgage applications, which includes both purchase and refinance
loans, for the week ended June 26 decreased 18.9 percent to 444.8, the
lowest reading since the week ended November 21, 2008.

California's lawmakers failed to agree on a balanced budget by the start of its new fiscal year Wednesday, clearing the way to suspend payments owed to the state's vendors and local agencies, who instead will get "IOU" notes...

As many as one in five U.S. hotel may default on their loans by the end of 2010 as the recession forces companies to spend less on travel and perks, according to Kenneth Rosen, an economist at the University of California.

With a day to go until a cash crisis would force the state to stop
paying its bills, lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger worked into
the night Tuesday but failed to reach a budget agreement.
The state Senate voted several times as midnight
approached in a last-ditch effort to approve $3.3 billion in cuts to
education and other programs and stave off, at least temporarily, the
IOUs that California Controller John Chiang is set to begin issuing
Thursday in lieu of some payments.